Does NCLB promote monolingualism?
By Rosemary Salomone, Education Week

Eight years into the No Child Left Behind Act, educators, researchers, and advocates remain locked in heated debate over the effects of the law’s testing and accountability mandates on students, many from immigrant homes where a language other than English is spoken. Remarkably lost in the crossfire are the equally serious implications for the nation and its competitive position internationally.

Two recently reported developments related to language instruction, set against rising multilingualism abroad, lend truth to that proposition. Together, they reveal that NCLB is an impediment to fostering bilingual skills and bicultural understandings, especially among the nation’s 12 million students from immigrant families, including the 5.1 million identified as English-language learners, as well as millions of English-dominant students who are economically disadvantaged.

The first of these developments has surfaced in the Obama administration’s proposed English Learning Education Program, with an $800 million commitment tucked into the president’s budget plan for fiscal 2011. The proposal, as laid out by Assistant U.S. Secretary of Education Thelma Melendez in a speech before bilingual educators in February, is a disheartening mix of more of the same peppered with hopeful hints of a changed vision.

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Coffee's clean bill of health
By Jennifer LaRue Huget, The Washington Post

Coffee.

Is there a more beautiful word in the English language?

My beloved morning cuppa is even more beloved than usual today as I, like millions of other Americans, cope with the loss of an hour’s sleep Saturday night/Sunday morning. It will take some of us days, maybe weeks to catch up and start feeling right again.

One of my favorite health blogs, the L.A. Times’s Booster Shots, did this neat roundup of the potential ill effects of daylight saving time on our health. It's sobering.

Of course, there’s no better cure for the loss of sleep than, well, sleep. But most of us don't have the luxury of staying in bed an extra hour. For better or worse, many will rely on coffee to carry us through this drowsy day.

It hasn’t been long since the medical community feared that coffee consumption might increase the risk of heart disease and cancer. Many of us remember with fear the scare over a purported link between coffee-drinking and pancreatic cancer. That’s been fully debunked.

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Distorting language for politics
By Roland Duerksen, Middletown Journal

Language is constantly evolving to keep up with the times. And that is a good thing. What is deplorable, though, is the intentional manipulation of the language to distort the meanings of words for ideational or political purposes.

This language distortion is now running rampant on the right. It hurts to see the language so abused.
To review some of these abuses, let’s consider the term “government.” For about 30 years now, rightists have considered government to be the problem – something to be overcome. But, literally, to remove government is to replace civilization by chaos and savagery.

So, obviously, the problem is not government, but bad government. It needs to be replaced by good government, for which the relevant criteria relate far more to results than to “big” or “small.”

Results, however, are not the concern of present-day rightists. Having long defined government as all that is reprehensible, they focus, instead, on more distortion of terms, in order to tear down their opposition.

A term that they have abused and distorted so badly that it seems beyond rehabilitation is “socialism.” Though it has an honorable place in European and other societies, the rightists have succeeded in equating it with the term “evil” in this country. At least for the time being, progressives may as well use other terms to further the cause of social improvement.

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Public diplomacy: The world should be teaching us, Mr. Kristof
By John Brown, adjunct professor of Liberal Studies, Georgetown University

[Says] well-meaning Nicholas D. Kristof in The New York Times:

“Peace Corps and Teach for America represent the best ethic of public service. But at a time when those programs can’t meet the demand from young people seeking to give back, we need a new initiative: Teach for the World.

“In my mind, Teach for the World would be a one-year program placing young Americans in schools in developing countries. The Americans might teach English or computer skills, or coach basketball or debate teams. ...

“This would be a government-financed effort to supplement an American public diplomacy outreach that has been eviscerated over the last few decades.”

Mr. Kristof, who wants young Americans to teach English the world over, seems unaware that all too many of us here in the homeland (which is how we now identify our cry-the-beloved country in these sad post-9/11 times) are incapable of writing a coherent English sentence free of grammatical and spelling errors. And how many of us called-to-duty language missionaries currently living in said homeland, if volunteering to coach “debate teams” overseas, could actually be capable of crafting a logical argument, given our 24/7 we-can’t-stop-loving-it culture of instant mindless gratification a la Tee-Vee & Twitter & uptalk?

“I mean, like you know, whatever”—such is, increasingly, our American contribution to serious world-wide discourse.

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Who on earth was Lewis Carroll? We'll just have to wonder…
By Robert McCrum, The Observer

“Who in the world am I?” The universal question Alice asks during her journey through Wonderland is among the many disturbing and memorable lines from a book that remains one of the most quoted in the English language, after the Bible and Shakespeare.

The haunting combination of Lewis Carroll and his Wonderland, an enigmatic writer and a mesmerising nonsense story, is one of the strangest in our literature. Originally created for a Victorian English family, the Caterpillar, the Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat, White Rabbit, Mad Hatter and the rest have joined the everyday cast of the world’s fantasies.

Translated by Nabokov into Russian, adapted by the Surrealists, championed by TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and WH Auden, and now filmed, for the umpteenth time, by Tim Burton in a calculated, charmless mash-up of Carrollian themes, the Alice books continue to exert an indestructible spell: teasing, phantasmagorical, narcotic, existential and profoundly English. Nothing you put on the 3D screen can equal Carroll’s imagination.

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The emergence of English
By Bibek Debroy, IndianExpress.com

This is odd. West Bengal’s Left Front government has done its best to replace English with Bengali, but at the all-India level, English has replaced Bengali.

There is always a problem with data on languages spoken. Typically, such data are only collected for mother tongue or first language. Thus, Chinese is estimated to be the most widely spoken language in the world, with 845 million native speakers. English is third (after Spanish) with 328 million.

How many people speak English as first language in India? Very few, around 225,000. However, English is widely spoken as a second language and arguments about India’s English-speaking advantage are based on this. 132 million Indians are estimated to speak English as second language and 100 million as third, leading to a total of almost 235 million.

Not everyone in the US speaks English, around 250 million do. Therefore, India produces the largest number of English-language speakers in the world after the US. And Nigeria, in third place, is a long distance behind.

But all these numbers are based on speculation and guesses. It is only now that we have some firm figures, based on the 2001 Census. The mother tongue data were published earlier. It is only now that bilingualism and trilingualism figures have surfaced.

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Abusing slow news days: Common mistakes in English
By Thom Holwerda, OSNews

Since everybody in the technology world is apparently having a vacation, and nobody told me about it, we're kind of low on news. As such, this seems like the perfect opportunity to gripe about something I've always wanted to gripe about: a number of common mistakes in English writing in the comments section. I'll also throw in some tidbits about my native language, Dutch, so you can compare and contrast between the two.

Let me start off by saying that overall, I think the OSNews readership has an absolutely excellent grasp of the English language. This is all the more impressive when you take into account that for about half of our readers, English is not their native language. We have readers from all over the world, and like me, and Eugenia before that, they grew up with other languages.

This means that this little story is not meant as some sort of arrogant diatribe about how the English language is being destroyed or whatever (heck, even after getting a university degree in this language I'm still making mistakes every other sentence). What I want to do here is point out some oft-made mistakes by many non-native speakers of English (and a lot of native speakers!) that are easy to combat.

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English as a life skill

The Sri Lanka India Centre for English Language Training (SLICELT) was opened by Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao recently. It marked a new beginning in English language education in Sri Lanka.

The establishment of SLICELT also marks a radical departure from the past in the way of learning and teaching English. While all other nations were speaking and using English in their own ways, Sri Lanka continued to speak and use English just as the English did. In fact, we were proud to admit that we use English the Queen's way long after becoming independent.

English educated gentry used to mock at other countries that developed their own English. Little did these brown sahibs realise that most of them would have been mocking at Sri Lankans for their attempts at safeguarding a colonial heritage. It was the Americans who started using English in their own way. The influence of American English has been so great that even the orthodox Britishers were compelled to borrow words and phrases from the American diction.

In retrospect we could observe that this overt subservience to the former coloniser’s language practice was a method to keep the knowledge of English language to a select few, to perpetuate a stratum of brown sahibs.

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